Friday, 1 January 2010

Christmas Tree Skirt

Christmas trees always look so bare after the presents have been opened on Christmas Day. I have decided to make a Christmas Tree skirt for my tree to wear at these occasions. Upon my research for finding out how to create one of these skirts I came across an excellent blog entry from Make It and Love it, this shows a step by step guide to how to make your own. In her entry she talked about using bias tape but I haven't any experience of using this material, so I did not use it in my design.

Items Needed:

1 Metre Square Fabric (I used purple polycotton)

Thread

Sewing Machine (optional)

Decorations if required (I created my own templates and made snowmen)

Time Taken - A day.Skills Leant: Hand sewing, cutting techniques.

Preparing the Fabric

I squared my fabric by measuring the sides to 1 meter and cutting off the excess. Also I ironed the fabric to get rid of any creases.

Cutting the Fabric

I folded the fabric in half and half again so that the fabric is folded 4 times.

I used a pin at the top corner of the fabric and held a tape measure measuring 50cm to create a curve.

At the top I made a smaller curve.

With scissors I cut out the bottom and the top curves.

Preparing to Hem

After cutting out the curves I unfolded the fabric.

I then cut a slit from the bottom to the middle of the circle, this is so the Christmas tree skirt will go around the base of a tree. I measured a 5/8" hem all around the fabric and used tailors chalk to mark it.

Then I made slight cuts at the bottom and also the top of the curves, this is to help it create a circle shape.

After all the cuts were made I pinned all the hems and used a straight stitch on the sewing machine.

Decorating the Tree Skirt

I decided to decorate mine with snowmen wearing hats. For this I made templates for the snowman bodies and hats and hand sewed the fabric onto the tree skirt.

Final Thoughts

Overall I am very pleased with how its turned out. The hand sewing of the decorative snowman took the longest. I still hope to add silver trim to give it a more polished look and also use Velcro to close the opening. I may have missed using the tree-skirt this year but have plenty of time to finish off for Christmas 2010. Do you have any ideas or techniques you can share with me on how I can attach the trim to my skirt?